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TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK: I grew up in a very religious family.

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There were several ministers in my family.

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You know, it was a sense of community.

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It was um filled with beautiful 
stories and great music.

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And those stories are things 
that you can just kind of

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take along in your pocket and 
take out whenever you need them.

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I thought I wanted to be a comic book artist,

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but over time I became interested 
in different kinds of art.

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But I never lost that love for that 
kind of storytelling, you know,

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this idea of superheroes and 
this panel by panel narrative.

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I like to pick language that 
has a certain kind of a cadence

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and I like to pick words 
that have double meanings.

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Or, if you take a letter away it’ll 
be maybe even an opposite word.

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Sometimes words explode and its 
just about each individual letter.


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TDH: Mounds are these half 
human, half plant mutants

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that came to life about 50,000 years ago

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when an ape man masturbated in a field of flowers.

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His human parts are co-mingling 
with the plant parts and, like,

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it’s starting to bubble and boil and 
something’s about to sprout out of this mess,

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and that’s the Mound.

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The story comes to me as visions.

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After I realized what Mounds were,

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I had a lot of questions for myself.

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So, where do they come from?

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How tall are they?

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Do they eat?

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Like, just all of these types of things.

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And in asking the question, you can 
then almost have like an epiphany

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and from there you just keep 
going and it actually snowballs.

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And to me, that’s what the vision is all about.

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This painting here is called “By and By”

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and this is the last in a series of paintings

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that are about the life and 
death of Mound number one

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and his name is The Legend.

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And the skeleton of Mound Number 
One has been left in the forest,

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and all of the forest animals and even 
some animals that are not from the forest

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have come to grieve and to pay their respects.

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I’ve always like the story of Noah’s Ark

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and the idea of all of these animals that

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put their differences aside 
to coexist in this one space.

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And that’s kind of what’s happening here.

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All the animals from around the 
world have gathered together

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to pay homage to this great creature.

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When you see black and white or 
words within paintings, it’s Loid.

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And Loid is kind of a father type of an energy.

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And he’s also all about kind of black and white.

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There’s no in between.

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Painter is a spirit energy who is 
kind of a mothering type of an energy.

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Anytime you see colors within the paintings,

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that’s as a result of Painter’s presence.

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A lot of it comes back to my mother.

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She is Painter and she is 
Loid wrapped up into one.

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You know, she is the smiling face of Painter, 
she is the color that you get from Painter.

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But at the same time she was 
stern when she spoke her word

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you had to listen, so she was also Loid.

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Mom: A lot of his art, I think, is 
what he has seen over the years,

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over his childhood --

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some of the hurtful things, I think.

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And then he wanted to get in 
there and do something about it.

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And I think he has created someone to do that,

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and that has become his Torpedo person.

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Torpedo Boy is kind of my alter ego.

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And I created him when I was, I 
would say, in the fourth grade.

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He can fly, he can lift things.

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He’s a super hero.

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And he’s super strong, except 
he has an inflated ego.

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Mom: I think eventually he will really find out

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who can actually solve it all

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and that goes right back 
to his roots and the Bible.

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TDH: Painter and Loid, you know, 
with their son Torpedo Boy,

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is a lot like the Holy Trinity.

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God sent his son down to save the Earth.

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Torpedo Boy is sent to like 
protect these Mound creatures

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and to do good things. But 
Torpedo Boy is terribly flawed.

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And his pride and all of his other human emotions

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get in the way of him performing his duties.

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He looks like me.

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He is me.

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I even have a Torpedo Boy outfit 
that I wear while I’m painting.

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In the show ‘It Came from the Studio Floor,’

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Torpedo Boy is the protagonist.

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And we are taken step by step through where he was

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when Mound Number One was attacked and killed.

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So, we get to see what, you know,

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what was the hold up,

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why didn’t he make it in time 
to save Mound Number One?

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In a way the scale of the show is kind of heroic.

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Like, there’s a giant Torpedo 
Boy “T” painted on the wall.

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But, he arose and fell all in the same show.

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(laughs) It’s pretty pathetic.

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I tend to have an entourage 
with me wherever I go –

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not necessarily people, but objects.

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I have a collection of grocery lists,

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plastic tops, amateur paintings,

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photos I find on the ground.

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Balloons – you can never have too many balloons.

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This belonged to my 
grandfather, who was a butcher,

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and I guess he used this to 
shield himself from offal

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and various meat juices.

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I don’t know, I just like to 
have echoes of my family around

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and then they echo into the work.

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Even here at home, I like to 
have things out all the time.

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I’m a big toy collector and 
I’ve been actively trying to

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piece together my childhood 
by finding all of those toys.

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It’s just an effort to reconnect with a time

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when I was just a little more 
open and receptive to things.

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And its just great to have these 
things around me as a reminder.

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It’s almost a dangerous obsession,

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like I have to get all of the toys 
since some of my toys were taken away,

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I have to now get all of them back.

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I had one when I was a kid, 
but it got thrown away.

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Monica: Some people put things 
in files or folders or stacks,

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but he doesn’t stack, he piles.

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TDH: I’m getting better about 
filing things because of her,

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because she’s organized, she can do that.

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It’s hard.

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Anywhere I move, these 
mounds seem to move with me.

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It's like, in my car there’s a 
pile of things that’s a mound.

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In my studio, there’s piles 
of things all over the place

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and that’s how I pick from these piles.


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What’s happening with the 
pieces that are in the studio,

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I see those as colorful blasts of 
energy or communication from Mounds,

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these visions of hope.

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So in a way it’s like God’s promise 
with the rainbow after the flood.

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In my work, I feel I’m finally 
being able to bring together

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the worlds of comic book narratives 
and the history of abstraction.